Casinos typically strive to have games that appeal to their customer base of players. One way to quantify customer enjoyment is by measuring the performance of each gaming device to ascertain which devices players prefer to play. From a slot manufacturing standpoint, game performance measurements or metrics enable these companies to design games that have features that are popular or preferred by players. These measurements have typically been limited to tracking the coin-in for electronic gaming devices and bets received for table games. Once these measurements have been collected for each gaming device, each gaming device is compared against a “house average” to determine if the gaming device has been popular with players.
For table games, these type of performance measurements usually only reveal broad trends such as differences in table denominations or differences in types of table games since the actual game from one similar table to another is largely identical. For electronic gaming devices, however, these performance numbers are often used to determine which games to buy, where to place certain games on the game floor, and how to configure certain game aspects.
One significant issue with simply comparing a games performance to the “house average” is that these numbers don't often accurately reflect the true value of a game. The house average is simply the total winnings of the house or casino for a group of gaming devices divided by the number of gaming devices. If a certain game often earns more than the house average, it is typically considered a successful game, while games that earn below the house average are generally regarded as less valuable. While comparisons to the house average may reflect how popular a game is relative to other games in the vicinity, it doesn't always reflect the games influence on overall casino revenue. For example, if Game A does three times the house average over the span of a week, but draws players from other games in the casino while Game B does only half of the house average but brings in entirely new players, which game is really more valuable to the casino? Obviously Game A is popular, but it doesn't help the overall casino revenue. On the other hand, Game B, although not as popular as Game A, is bringing in entirely new players and additional revenue from those new players. Thus, what is needed is a way to capture a games value to the casino instead of merely judging its relative popularity.